Assumptions of brightness constancy and spatial smoothness underlie most optical flow estimation methods. In contrast to standard heuristic formulations, we learn a statistical model of both brightness constancy error and the spatial properties of optical flow using image sequences with associated ground truth flow fields. The result is a complete probabilistic model of optical flow. Specifically, the ground truth enables us to model how the assumption of brightness constancy is violated in naturalistic sequences, resulting in a probabilistic model of "brightness inconstancy". We also generalize previous high-order constancy assumptions, such as gradient constancy, by modeling the constancy of responses to various linear filters in a high-order random field framework. These filters are free variables that can be learned from training data. Additionally we study the spatial structure of the optical flow and how motion boundaries are related to image intensity boundaries. Spatial smoothness is modeled using a Steerable Random Field, where spatial derivatives of the optical flow are steered by the image brightness structure. These models provide a statistical motivation for previous methods and enable the learning of all parameters from training data. All proposed models are quantitatively compared on the Middlebury flow dataset.

This paper presents design and development of a six legged
robot with a total of 12 degrees of freedom, two in each
limb and then an implementation of 'obstacle and undulated
terrain-based' probabilistic roadmap method for motion
planning of this hexaped which is able to negotiate large
undulations as obstacles. The novelty in this implementation
is that, it doesnt require the complete view of the robot's
configuration space at any given time during the traversal. It generates a map of the area that is in visibility range and finds the best suitable point in that field of view to make it as the next node of the algorithm. A particular category of undulations which are small enough are automatically 'run-over' as a part of the terrain and not considered as obstacles.
The traversal between the nodes is optimized by taking the
shortest path and the most optimum gait at that instance
which the hexaped can assume. This is again a novel
approach to have a real time gait changing technique to
optimize the travel time. The hexaped limb can swing in the
robot's X-Y plane and the lower link of the limb can move
in robot's Z plane by an implementation of a four-bar
mechanism. A GUI based server 'Yellow Ladybird'
eventually which is the name of the hexaped, is made for
real time monitoring and communicating to it the final
destination co-ordinates.

We propose a method to estimate the detailed 3D shape of a person from images of that person wearing clothing. The approach exploits a model of human body shapes that is learned from a database of over 2000 range scans. We show that the parameters of this shape model can be recovered independently of body pose. We further propose a generalization of the visual hull to account for the fact that observed silhouettes of clothed people do not provide a tight bound on the true 3D shape. With clothed subjects, different poses provide different constraints on the possible underlying 3D body shape. We consequently combine constraints across pose to more accurately estimate 3D body shape in the presence of occluding clothing. Finally we use the recovered 3D shape to estimate the gender of subjects and then employ gender-specific body models to refine our shape estimates. Results on a novel database of thousands of images of clothed and "naked" subjects, as well as sequences from the HumanEva dataset, suggest the method may be accurate enough for biometric shape analysis in video.

Existing approaches to nonrigid structure from motion assume that the instantaneous 3D shape of a deforming object is a linear combination of basis shapes, which have to be estimated anew for each video sequence. In contrast, we propose that the evolving 3D structure be described by a linear combination of basis trajectories. The principal advantage of this approach is that we do not need to estimate any basis vectors during computation. We show that generic bases over trajectories, such as the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) basis, can be used to compactly describe most real motions. This results in a significant reduction in unknowns, and corresponding stability in estimation. We report empirical performance, quantitatively using motion capture data, and qualitatively on several video sequences exhibiting nonrigid motions including piece-wise rigid motion, partially nonrigid motion (such as a facial expression), and highly nonrigid motion
(such as a person dancing).

The detection and pose estimation of people in images and video is made challenging by the variability of human appearance, the complexity of natural scenes, and the high dimensionality of articulated body models. To cope with these problems we represent the 3D human body as a graphical model in which the relationships between the body parts are represented by conditional probability distributions. We formulate the pose estimation problem as one of probabilistic inference over a graphical model where the random variables correspond to the individual limb parameters (position and orientation). Because the limbs are described by 6-dimensional vectors encoding pose in 3-space, discretization is impractical and the random variables in our model must be continuous-valued. To approximate belief propagation in such a graph we exploit a recently introduced generalization of the particle filter. This framework facilitates the automatic initialization of the body-model from low level cues and is robust to occlusion of body parts and scene clutter.

This paper proposes a solution for the automatic detection and tracking of human motion in image sequences. Due to the complexity of the human body and its motion, automatic detection of 3D human motion remains an open, and important, problem. Existing approaches for automatic detection and tracking focus on 2D cues and typically exploit object appearance (color distribution, shape) or knowledge of a static background. In contrast, we exploit 2D optical flow information which provides rich descriptive cues, while being independent of object and background appearance. To represent the optical flow patterns of people from arbitrary viewpoints, we develop a novel representation of human motion using low-dimensional spatio-temporal models that are learned using motion capture data of human subjects. In addition to human motion (the foreground) we probabilistically model the motion of generic scenes (the background); these statistical models are defined as Gibbsian fields specified from the first-order derivatives of motion observations. Detection and tracking are posed in a principled Bayesian framework which involves the computation of a posterior probability distribution over the model parameters (i.e., the location and the type of the human motion) given a sequence of optical flow observations. Particle filtering is used to represent and predict this non-Gaussian posterior distribution over time. The model parameters of samples from this distribution are related to the pose parameters of a 3D articulated model (e.g. the approximate joint angles and movement direction). Thus the approach proves suitable for initializing more complex probabilistic models of human motion. As shown by experiments on real image sequences, our method is able to detect and track people under different viewpoints with complex backgrounds.

We describe a 2.5D layered representation for visual motion analysis. The representation provides a global interpretation of image motion in terms of several spatially localized foreground regions along with a background region. Each of these regions comprises a parametric shape model and a parametric motion model. The representation also contains depth ordering so visibility and occlusion are rightly included in the estimation of the model parameters. Finally, because the number of objects, their positions, shapes and sizes, and their relative depths are all unknown, initial models are drawn from a proposal distribution, and then compared using a penalized likelihood criterion. This allows us to automatically initialize new models, and to compare different depth orderings.

This paper addresses the problem of probabilistically modeling 3D human motion for synthesis and tracking. Given the high dimensional nature of human motion, learning an explicit probabilistic model from available training data is currently impractical. Instead we exploit methods from texture synthesis that treat images as representing an implicit empirical distribution. These methods replace the problem of representing the probability of a texture pattern with that of searching the training data for similar instances of that pattern. We extend this idea to temporal data representing 3D human motion with a large database of example motions. To make the method useful in practice, we must address the problem of efficient search in a large training set; efficiency is particularly important for tracking. Towards that end, we learn a low dimensional linear model of human motion that is used to structure the example motion database into a binary tree. An approximate probabilistic tree search method exploits the coefficients of this low-dimensional representation and runs in sub-linear time. This probabilistic tree search returns a particular sample human motion with probability approximating the true distribution of human motions in the database. This sampling method is suitable for use with particle filtering techniques and is applied to articulated 3D tracking of humans within a Bayesian framework. Successful tracking results are presented, along with examples of synthesizing human motion using the model.

Relations between anisotropic diffusion and robust statistics are described. We show that anisotropic diffusion can be seen as a robust estimation procedure that estimates a piecewise smooth image from a noisy input image. The "edge-stopping" function in the anisotropic diffusion equation is closely related to the error norm and influence function in the robust estimation framework. This connection leads to a new "edge-stopping" function based on Tukey's biweight robust estimator, that preserves sharper boundaries than previous formulations and improves the automatic stopping of the diffusion. The robust statistical interpretation also provides a means for detecting the boundaries (edges) between the piecewise smooth regions in the image. We extend the framework to vector-valued images and show applications to robust image sharpening.

A framework for learning parameterized models of optical flow from image sequences is presented. A class of motions is represented by a set of orthogonal basis flow fields that are computed from a training set using principal component analysis. Many complex image motions can be represented by a linear combination of a small number of these basis flows. The learned motion models may be used for optical flow estimation and for model-based recognition. For optical flow estimation we describe a robust, multi-resolution scheme for directly computing the parameters of the learned flow models from image derivatives. As examples we consider learning motion discontinuities, non-rigid motion of human mouths, and articulated human motion.

In this paper, we present an automatic system for analyzing and annotating video sequences of technical talks. Our method uses a robust motion estimation technique to detect key frames and segment the video sequence into subsequences containing a single overhead slide. The subsequences are stabilized to remove motion that occurs when the speaker adjusts their slides. Any changes remaining between frames in the stabilized sequences may be due to speaker gestures such as pointing or writing and we use active contours to automatically track these potential gestures. Given the constrained domain we define a simple ``vocabulary'' of actions which can easily be recognized based on the active contour shape and motion. The recognized actions provide a rich annotation of the sequence that can be used to access a condensed version of the talk from a web page.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems